The experiment lasted for over half an hour.
When Klein removed the blue-backed fish from the preservation solution, his movements were very light. He used the sampling knife to slice along the ventral line with a practiced, fluid motion, no different from the hundreds of specimen dissections he had performed back at the manor.
The fish's internal organs were normal. The muscle texture was normal. The blood's color, viscosity, and oxidation rate—every single metric fell within the standard range for an ordinary offshore fish.
It was unsettlingly normal.
Nelisa stood to the side of the workbench. She didn't crowd him, but she didn't leave either. She watched Klein work in silence, occasionally looking down to jot a few notes in her small notebook. This woman had an incredibly strong drive for observation—not the kind of staring driven by idle curiosity, but a merchant-like, precise collection of information. She was judging Klein's skill level while also gauging the direction of this entire affair.
Ophelia remained leaning near the doorframe, not moving from her spot, her gaze fixed intently on Klein and Nelisa.
Klein placed the tissue slices into the array disk and activated the analysis array. This set of equipment had been brought in by Nelisa; its precision wasn't quite as high as the one at his manor, but it excelled in stability—being new equipment, it lacked any fatigue-induced errors.
Rows of readings began to jump out.
He read them very slowly.
It wasn't that he couldn't understand them, but rather that he was confirming them repeatedly. He cross-referenced every set of data twice, comparing them against the information structure of the Siren before its collapse that he had stored in his mind.
Ten minutes later, he deactivated the array.
The experimental results were in.
On a physical level, this fish was no different from any other ordinary wild fish in these waters. If you threw it into a fish market, no one would be able to pick it out.
But on the information level—
Its biological information possessed an extremely faint, structured characteristic. This trait didn't affect any of its functions as a fish; it didn't impact its swimming, feeding, or breeding. However, if you were to extract this informational characteristic separately and compare it to the Siren's pre-collapse information matrix—
Its match rate with a certain frequency band exceeded ninety percent.
It was a part of the Siren.
It wasn't a lingering image or a projection; it was a genuine information fragment torn from within the Siren that had found a physical substrate and grown into a living fish.
Klein set down the array disk and leaned against the edge of the workbench, supporting himself with both hands on the surface.
All his previous hypotheses were confirmed. The essence of the Siren's collapse wasn't a breakdown, but a fragmentation—a composite information entity had been triggered by the act of observation into a state collapse, breaking apart into countless independent information fragments, each of which sought its own physical substrate to generate a physical entity.
These entities were the "new species" now appearing in the sea.
They were harmless. At least for now.
But—
That was precisely what made Klein uneasy.
The Siren itself was a conceptual branch of the Will of the Deep Sea. And what was the Will of the Deep Sea? It was an evil god, a source of pollution.
So, why did the Siren exist in the form of a "composite information entity"?
Was she manufactured? Or was it natural evolution?
If it was manufactured—who did it? What methods were used? To compress and fold the information of hundreds or thousands of different organisms into a single individual... Klein admitted he couldn't achieve such a feat, and he couldn't even say for sure if a sage could.
If it was natural evolution—that was even more hair-raising. Because it meant the Will of the Deep Sea itself possessed some ability to actively aggregate scattered concepts into a composite entity.
Aggregate, encapsulate, compress.
Wait for conditions to ripen.
Then, decompress.
Klein tapped his fingers on the table a few times, rhythmically at first, then purely out of thought.
"Have you run into trouble?" Nelisa's voice came from the side, her tone steady. "Does the chamber need to do anything?"
"No trouble," Klein said, shaking his head. "Quite the opposite, actually. The results are too clean."
He straightened up and began putting the experimental tools back in their places. His movements were steady and unhurried, returning every item to its original position. This habit had been forged in the alchemical laboratory—no matter how chaotic his thoughts, the things in his hands could not be messy.
"I'll need to do several more rounds of cross-validation on these samples later, but the general direction is clear enough for now."
Nelisa nodded, not pressing him on what that "general direction" was. She waited for him to speak on his own.
Klein didn't.
He walked to the window and pushed it open.
The sea breeze rushed in immediately. It carried salt, moisture, and that faint, lingering fishy sweetness—he now knew the source of that scent; it came from the fish that shouldn't exist. It was information residue at a scent level, barely catchable by human olfaction.
For Ophelia, it probably wasn't just "barely."
He turned his head to glance at her.
Ophelia met his gaze and gave a slight shake of her head—meaning, "I'm fine."
Klein withdrew his gaze and looked out at the sea.
The gray-blue water shimmered with broken light under the afternoon sun, revealing nothing unusual. But those things were right there beneath the surface. Dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of organisms torn from the Siren were swimming, crawling, and attaching themselves to reefs in these waters, living quietly.
"I need to go out to sea."
Nelisa's pen paused for a fraction of a second.
"I need to see exactly what the situation is under the water." Klein turned around. "Samples are dead, and data is dead. I have to go down and see the living ones, the whole picture. How these things are distributed, their density, whether there's a trend of gathering—I can't judge that just from a few dozen fish scooped up in nets."
Nelisa closed her notebook. "I can arrange a boat. But which area do you plan to go to? There are five coastal areas reporting anomalies; the farthest one is eighty nautical miles north of Silver Scale Harbor."
"We'll go to the closest one first."
"When do we leave?"
"Now."
Nelisa glanced at him but didn't say anything like "it's too sudden." She turned and walked out, giving a few instructions to the person at the door as she went. Her voice was low but clear.
The person at the door ran off.
Klein began packing his things.
Ophelia walked over from the doorframe, her footsteps light. She came to a stop beside him, not helping, just watching him stuff the array disk and several portable tools into his backpack.
"I'm going too," she said.
Klein buckled the strap of his backpack. He looked up at her.
Ophelia looked back, her golden eyes perfectly calm.
He gave a small smile and slung the backpack over his shoulder.
"Then let's go."
Rate on N.U.
